From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 18:15:42 EDT
> The norms of written English are determined
> exclusively by Hartree-Fock approximations.
...which is John Cowan's clever way of indicating that
for English, every writer is influenced by every other
writer, rather than following some predefined set of
rules. Figuring out the norm for English is a little
like calculating the "wavefunction" of all the writers,
and for that, you examine them one at a time and
calculate their individual wavefunctions, in terms of
their influence by the "potential" of all the others.
Then you repeat that process for each of the others,
and then cycle through the entire process for everybody until
the resultant wavefunction stabilizes.
Of course, the English atom is continually perturbed
by all the other linguistic atoms, and there is no
guarantee that a Hartree-Fock approximation would
actually settle towards a norm -- the behavior might
actually be chaotic. ...
Ou7fit5 w4r3z cUltUr3 4nd L337 haxOr dOOds \/\/17h clO7hIng
4nD Oth3r f1n3 4cc355Or13s. 1 4/\/\ Ow|\|1nG 7|-|15 570r3!!
{You will now be returned to your original writer...}
So you never really know what might actually happen
to written English, given a little time. ;-)
--Ken
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